Shaman On Ramen

They buff because they care.

There is an oft-repeated maxim on the shaman forums that Enhance shaman scale with every raid buff/debuff that exists. For the most part, this is true- I’m personally not positive what I’m getting from Divine Spirit, but other than that I’d agree. However, what we don’t tend to talk about is how much we scale with these raid buffs, and what raid buffs do we absolutely need to see in a raid.

I felt that it would be a fun project to see exactly how much we do benefit from each debuff, so I opened up my handy dandy enh simulator and simmed my DPS five times, averaging out to 7347DPS with .05% Out of Mana time. I then went and systematically removed buffs/debuffs and recorded the damage lost. For simming unleashed rage, I did one sim without changing my expertise to emulate not taking the talent, but having another 10% ap buff (abom might/trueshot), and another sim without changing my expertise and not having another 10% ap buff. For 3% spell hit, I dropped my hit rating down to 368 as I’m spell hit capped in my current gear. I also looked at the difference between using regular and improved versions of the buffs I remembered to.

Something important to keep in mind here is that these numbers are based on my own individual gear, and that they will probably differ from your own values. Beyond that, buffs and debuffs play with each other, so in order to figure out the exact data you’d probably have to do tons of combinations of sims. So, take these as they are: a basic idea of what you’ll get from different buffs and debuffs. Without further ado, this is the raw data I collected:

So, with the raw data behind us, let’s take a look at what this means. First off, let’s look at the buffs you bring to yourself in a raid: One Enhancement Shaman, specced into Cookie Cutter Imp. SoE/Imp. WF/Unleashed Rage (Relying on other for FT in favor of using magma): 1557 DPS. By not dropping your totems or speccing into unleashed rage, you gimp yourself out of 1,557 dps. So, don’t be lazy and drop your totems. That said, if you’re the type of person looking to play better by reading information on blogs, I doubt you’re doing something as silly as not dropping totems. :P

Now, let’s look at something that a lot of people DO do- try to skip out on improving their own totems to gain talent points elsewhere. The rationale of “oh, the other enhance shaman brings imp. soe” or “the frost dk has imp. icy talons” might work…until they die. And once they die, and you’re left not specced into these abilities and this is the case: One Enhancement Shaman using untalented Imp. WF/Imp Soe/16% Melee Haste= 184 DPS. You gain 184 DPS just by speccing into these talents.

Some of the more important things to look at: Imp. BS/Imp. Might are the best possible buff for us, at 455 dps. Regular might is fine, but we lose 89 dps from not getting the improved version.

Finally, here are some of the best combinations of classes for us (assuming no one else in the raid can provide all their buffs. This is rarely the case- you might not have a moonkin, but your ret paladin will be supplying 3% haste. Or something.):

The kind of really striking thing to me was that the fury warrior ended up giving more dps than the boomkin, proving my own hypothesis wrong. D:

So, there you have it. These are the way debuffs play out for me, and I’d imagine most people would see numbers within a few standard deviations. Hope this helped!

As a reminder, my blog has moved. This is one of the few posts that will be published here before I permanently leave for Shamanonramen.com. If you have me linked/bookmarked/anything, you might want to update them there!

That is an amazing bit of analysis. Very interesting to see the results. I will definitely be sharing that with my fellow guild leaders. And it also justifies my obsession with ensuring all raid members are flasked and fed.